Free Capitalist No Longer Free

OMG, they finally nailed Rick Koerber to the wall.  It ought to be amazing it took so long, but given Utah's track record in such cases, I guess the miracle is that the case was prosecuted at all (Note that it required bringing in an outside judge to finally make this fly.).  Now I hope the Tenth Circuit doesn't bollocks the inevitable appeal.

With Friends Like This

The Republican Party is ostensibly the party of business, and it certainly has burnished that image in Utah.  Which makes you wonder just what Rep. Carl Wimmer is trying to prove with his campaign against the federal health care initiatives.

In case you hadn't noticed, if you're a small business, health costs are a big burden.  If you provide health insurance, you already know what I mean.  But the burden is there even if you don't.  First, if you don't provide health insurance, you're competing for talent with those that do, and guess who wins.  Second, if you aren't providing health insurance, chances are your employees don't have any, which makes it more likely they'll get sick and either miss work altogether or (worse) show up to work sick.  Third, lack of health insurance imposes a hidden tax on all of us that I call The Bankruptcy Tax.  In spite of the current downturn, the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy remains medical bills (And a significant cause of several, recent corporate bankruptcies has been the increasing burden of medical costs on pension plans.).  Have you ever had to write off bills because the customers filed bankruptcy?  Chances are it was medical bills that drove them there.

So before you start screaming about "socialized medicine" and "federal interference", take a look at the costs the current system is imposing on you.  They're big.

Which leads me back to wondering just what Wimmer is trying to prove.  Maybe he's trying to distract attention from his "special relationship" with Rick Koerber.

The "Free Capitalist" Roped In

As anyone who reads my blogs knows, I was always leery of the real estate boom.  I've seen too many of them bust.  By the end of 2005, I was warning anyone who would listen they were making long term investments with a short term upside.  By the end of 2006, I was setting off flares.  Nobody wanted to hear, and here we are.

During all those smoke and mirrors, people were either shoveling money in or getting others to shovel in.  And they all had good excuses.  Everybody was doing it (Which was nearly true.).  There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it because it was all out in the open and no one was getting busted (Which was also true.  TV, radio, and billboards were full of ads for strawmen and flips, and neither the state nor the feds seemed to be cracking down on it in any way.).  And there was one company with a massive profile that seemed to be doing it all without any regulators saying "Boo": Franklin Squires.  I tell you it was impossible in the face of all that to convince people to stay away from the game.

And of course the face, the brains, the man on the throne of Franklin Squires was Rick Koerber.  And as things fell apart, a lot of the people who got into serious legal trouble seemed to be Koerber's alums.  Yet Koerber himself was unscathed.  In fact he got louder, directly challenging the regulators, at one point seemingly making the state securities division turn tail.

That was curious.  And the reason was obvious.  FIHP.  Koerber had friends in high places.  Specifically Herriman's own Carl Wimmer, who ran interference for Koerber and even instigated a legislative audit of the securities division when it had the temerity to investigate Koerber.  You tax dollars at work.

Well, the legislature couldn't audit the SEC or the FBI or Brett Tolman's office.  And now Koerber's indicted, and Wimmer is backstroking so fast I think he just burned Michael Phelps.  I guess he wasn't too big to fail (And trust me on this, nothing is.  Empires have failed.  What makes banks and brokerages think they can't?).

Remember as you go down the road that there are certain truths that never seem to go away:

If it seems too good to be true, it is.

There's no honor among thieves.

There's always a bigger fish.